The Gumball Family Tree

A Strange Game Origin Story (part 1)

Pirate Studebaker

May 23, 2024

The wide open beginning of any story ends in a nutshell or sometimes a gumball.

All the possibilities present in the birth of a person come under pressure from the shaping of experiences to the end.

There are no vacuums in TIME. All the HOLES are filled.

One by one. Even if you don’t remember the filling.

It is said GOD knew us all from THE BEGINNING OF CREATION.

Which means He knows us from BEGINNING to END.

I ponder how fascinating it must be to know each person’s end, yet observe the path to the end as the holes are filled with twists and turns of CHOICES MADE AS TIME PASSES UNDER THE PRESSURE OF CIRCUMSTANCE.

AND WHAT WE CHOOSE TO DO IN THE FACE OF LOSS.

AND EVERY CHOICE WE MAKE.

And He gave us the ULTIMATE CHOICE.

How to pave the road anew or get stuck in the mud.

As each possibility is split from the rough DIAMOND.

REVEALING ITS BRILLIANCE IN THE LIGHT.

OR LOST IN THE DARK.

My story follows suit.

Because context is EVERYTHING. Context is the filled holes in the road.

And I love Rocky Road Ice Cream.

The Sweetgum Tree is an invasive species that grows across a wide swathe of the Southern US. It grows large and quickly, losing branches, falling over and, of course, drops gumballs everywhere.

The bane of many a gardner.

Shockingly, gumballs are FLOWERS. Not nuts though they look nuts.

The Sweet Gum is in the eucalyptus family and puts up a fiery show in the Fall :

MY FAMILY OF GUMBALLS THAT FELL FROM THE SWEET GUM TREE.

THE PATRIARCHY :

My Grandfather met my Grandmother when she was 13 years old and he was 28 years old. She was a true blue Hillbilly Child from the Ozark Mountains, barefoot (watch out for GUMBALLS) with long blond hair that grew all the way down below her child’s waist.

He was a mystery and remained so all his life.

The story goes he spied her at the General Store also the Post Office and The Justice of The Peace. She was buying sugar.

He had a photo snapped of her, bought her her first ever pair of shoes and walked with her in her new shoes back to her home where he paid her parents FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS so he could marry her that very day.

AND SO THEY MARRIED.

He took her far away (for her) to a rocky piece of land in Arkansas. She never saw her family of birth again.

He impregnated her many times between his lengthy unexplained periods of abandonment. Six of the children lived.

My Father being the youngest of the six.

My Grandmother and the children built a house of the very rocks of the land and farmed the little farm they lived off of.

They built it stacking the rocks horizontally since they had little money for concrete. A rubble build.

Just outside the closest town was a sign I remember that read :

IF YOU’RE BLACK DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR BACK.

Fur real.

My Father said he had no memory of ever speaking to his father until he was sixteen. There were hushed rumours my Father’s eldest sister who was sixteen years his senior was actually his mother. There were darker rumours of who his father was. Who he thought his father was was his father...Maybe? This gets dark.

So...my Father grew up dirt poor on a hardscrabble farm in Arkansas. He was doted on by his mother (or Grandmother..?) and greatly resented, some say abused, by his older siblings except his older sister who may have been his mother.

His older sister who went on to marry a man with the same last name as the Wichita, Kansas serial killer, the self-appointed BTK (Bind/Torture/Kill). My Aunt and her husband, my Father’s older sister (perhaps mother) of the same last name as BTK, lived a few miles from BTK.

BTK who lived a few blocks from my Father and Mother’s house in Wichita.

BTK, who had an affinity for the same unusual first name - REX - as my Father, which BTK used publicly as a pseudonym.

And a preference for the POLAROID AS DID MY FATHER. Many POLAROIDS were found capturing BTK in varying modes of drag, dressed like his slaughtered victims. No one knows who took those POLAROIDS.

I’VE NEVER HEARD ANYONE IN THE PLETHORA OF DOCUMENTARIES ON BTK ASK THE QUESTION : Who took those POLAROIDS OF BTK IN DRAG?

But I travel too far into the future...More later...

As a child, my Father was dressed in extravagant clothing and groomed and photographed professionally throughout the years. Though his family could hardly afford such indulgence.

He grew to be six feet and six inches tall and excelled at all sports. He attended a one room school with twelve other students in his class upon graduation, one being my future Mother. He was very handsome and charming and narcissistic.

My sweet naive Grandmother told me at every opportunity Bob Hope was our cousin from my Grandfather’s side of the Gumball Tree.

SHE WAS SO PROUD OF THIS RELATIONSHIP TO BOB.

If you’ve read or know anything about Brice Taylor, MK Ultra child sex slave survivor, you know what she called Bob Hope in her memoir THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES (irony intended...) :

HER OWNER.

Brice Taylor whose life story so closely parallels another “survivor” named Cathy O’Brien who was “rescued from enslavement” by an “EX-CIA Operative”. Somehow Brice and Cathy’s lives so closely matched they both gave birth to daughters while still enslaved. BOTH NAMED KELLY. And much more...hmmm. Life’s coincidences are amazing, no? Even for child sex slaves.

Somehow Cathy O’Brien became a world class speaker and authority on MK ULTRA MIND CONTROL and travels the world with her HANDLER, uh, “EX-CIA GUY”, while BRICE TAYLOR has been all but eclipsed.

Like the sun by the moon.

Kinda strange the moon just happens to be the perfect size at the perfect distance from us to do this? WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE?

My sweet and naive Grandmother was also great friends with SAM WALTON. She was also very proud of this friendship.

Why the friendship? They lived a hundred miles apart. Their lives and paths did not cross.

What interest did Sam Walton have in an abandoned dirt poor woman with a bunch of children on a barely sustainable farm in Arkansas?

Charity for the less fortunate? Largess of SPIRIT? Cuz WALMART IS KNOWN FOR ITs TENDERHEARTEDNESS. Awwww...

Fast forward.

The only memory I have of my Paternal Grandfather I’m around the age of two. I am at a picnic under a gumball tree on my Grandparent’s farm. It is a very large tree with a big broad canopy. Gumballs are good like that.

It is so quiet and hot. I hear flies buzzing. Everyone is full of food and sleepy eyed. A family of fallen gumballs resting up before cleaning up.

All the families are together. My Grandmother, the Aunts, the Uncles, the Cousins. My Mother. My Father. Sitting and lying on quilts my Grandmother sewed by hand from scraps.

My baby brother is beginning to crawl. So is my girl cousin. They crawl into an open jar of pickles and knock it over.

Everyone goes beserk as if a bomb has gone off. Grabbing crawling babies. Jerking quilts off the ground. As if the ship is sinking.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My Grandfather, I remember a wiry little man in overalls and a felt hat, walks up stiffly and yells,

“What’s wrong with all a youse? Ya actin’ like the damn sky is fallin’!” Everyone froze. Petrified Gumballs.

I remember agreeing with him silently in my head.

That’s my first and last memory of my Grandfather. He died soon thereafter.

My Father rarely spoke of his childhood. His father, my Grandfather, remained a mystery to me as he did to him.

My Father. Dad.

Young John Wayne. My Father was a DEAD RINGER for John Wayne. Seriously, they could have been twins. Cloning Program anyone? Will we ever know? Anything?

My Mother told me there was no way in hell I could remember that picnic. That I was too young. Yet, I remember every moment of it. Down to the smell of spilt pickles.